"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Hate Mail

I do think that the assault on the transcendent aspects of reality is intimately linked to the introduction and hegemony of scientism in the culture. That starts in exactly the restrictions of what is included within science in order to try to do what its purpose is, to try to find some generally applicable facts about physical objects and phenomena of enhanced reliability. To do that many aspects of real objects and real phenomena in real life are left out because those aspects, real as they are, aren't relevant to generally discernable qualities of the set of objects and phenomena those particular and real objects and phenomena are members of. In its most effective science comes up with information about limited aspects those sets of objects and phenomena through abstracting them, removing any particular aspects of them, though there is always a danger that you will either abstract the object out of any real existence or that you will mistake the limited information you can gain through science as an exhaustive reality of the object itself.

When scientists pretend to be able to apply those techniques to human or animal minds, consciousness, intelligence, etc. the returns diminish in direct proportion to the pretenses that are involved. It is seen in the scandalous history of psychology and the other social sciences as they violate pretty much all of the rules of science while pretending that their results have the reliability of the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry or even the strictly scientific aspects of biology and the life sciences - which have their issues with stretching their practices and what those yield which is permitted to be called "data" but which sometimes leave a lot to be desired in those terms.

When that gets totally out of hand in the even more obvious pseudo-scientific assertions of debunking the very thing which all of the scientists, near scientists, pseudo-scientists and assorted academic wannabees, as can be seen in the assertion that our minds are products of physical causation, free will and free thought are illusions, that consciousness, itself, is a mere epiphenomenon of physical causation and a vulgar, ridiculously reductive conception of genes and DNA and what those really are and really do, they impeach the very minds which are the only place in the known universe where science and all of the rest of it is generated and resides. The neuroscientists, the people who study consciousness, and right on down to the ultimate decadence of "neuro-philosophers" are like realators who try to sell you a house only to burn it down as you're signing the contract. They, the Wilsons, the Dennetts, the Churchlands, are the ultimate exemplars of intellectual decadence, the academic institutions that employ them are the ultimate exemplars of academic decadence.

The whole thing is fascinating as a study in how far they are willing to go in destroying the status of everything, including the very categories of truth and reality in persuit of atheist-materialism. That makes theirs the most decadent of ideologies in the history of recorded human thought, worse than the nihilists who were arguably at least honest about what they were up to. And as they could corrupt the wider society with their wrecking job on transcendent reality and the truth, they have found their most successful results in such politicians and strongmen who put into practice the results of their work. Trump and his post-reality period of rule should stand as their greatest experiment and test in reality, such as they leave that as being.

Update: Steve Simels is a liar and the people he tells his lies to are a small congregation of incurious mid-brow dolts. I don't care what they don't think.

On Comments

This is a blog for adults and I intend to keep it that way.

I've been forced to go back to moderating comments since some people abused the privilege. Adulthood confers privileges that childishness shouldn't. Please be patient, barring accidents, any comment that should be posted will be.

ABOUT MUSIC VIDEOS

I post music videos to inspire you to support living, working musicians, to buy their recordings so they can continue with their music and to buy the recordings of artists who have passed so their music will be preserved and available into the future.

About Me

I am a gay man, a religious man, an equality absolutist, a democrat, and a primitive socialist who believes that the means of production are by right in the ownership of those who produce wealth. I am an environmentalist of the extreme kind who is convinced that the way things are going now will lead to the extinction of people, of many other species of life for the benefit of a pathologically greedy elite who must be stopped and leveled with the rest of us. If that's not radical enough, I believe that reality is real and that most of what gets called liberalism and leftism in the United States is an impotent fraud based in fashion and the conceit of a bunch of elitists who delight in despising people they consider beneath them. Thus the political impotence of that style of pseudo-liberalism which is merely a liberalish-libertarianism. My heroes include Shirley Chisholm, Martin Luther King jr. the liberation theologians, and a few politicians, Senator Whitehouse and Sanders, many of the members of the Congressional progressive and black caucuses and other politicians who actually struggle to change laws and make real lives really better.

On Being Disreputable

After seven years of being told that what I've said is beyond the bounds of ... something, they're hardly ever specific, and that I'm just awful, I've decided to go with that.